Elena Undone Read Online Free

Article Due!” circled in big red marker.
    Feeling overwhelmed, she returned to her work. Then noticed that the pens and pencils in her Franklin Day Planner cup holder had been messed with. Must have been one of the nurses borrowing a pen. She knew precisely where and how each pen and pencil fit into the holder on her massive reclaimed pine dining room table that she used as her desk, and now stringently went to work to set the world straight.
    As she fussed endlessly, in the back of her mind she ran the rather pointless equation that every moment she devoted to her OCD was a minute lost to her deadline, but nevertheless, in this particular instance her OCD was winning out.
    Living with her obsessive compulsive disorder or “relentless brain drain,” as she referred to it, had been a ceaseless, and for the most part, unwinnable battle since she had turned seventeen and had had her first full-blown panic attack. Convinced she was having a heart attack she had driven herself straight to the ER, crumpling the front end of her Toyota into a garbage dumpster on the way, so shaken was she by her racing heart and inability to breathe.
    For the next eight years, she battled this disorder by white-knuckling a cure. Sometimes she drank away her attacks, only to find them worse the next day. Doctor after doctor informed her that she was not only healthy, but inordinately fit. Her obsessive need to swim one hundred laps a day along with her rigorous workout regime had prompted one doctor to fawn, “Your body is like a work of art. Your arms couldn’t be more sculpted. I find women with arms so defined, hmm, quite beautiful. Please just don’t overdo it.” The r d it.”obsequious doctor had smiled at her a little too sweetly and Peyton found a new doctor.
    She had seen specialist after specialist consumed with the idea of inoperable brain tumors, an as yet undiscovered rare blood disease, an electrical malfunction within her heart—it had to be something. Because even when her mother noted with jarring coldness, “This is all in your head and you need to stop it,” she knew whatever she had was real. If her heart could pummel out of her chest in the middle of the night during a deep sleep, it wasn’t her imagination. Either that or her body had a mind of its own.
    One day as she walked by the front of a bookstore she saw a book that literally popped out at her: The Good News about Panic Attacks, Anxiety and Agoraphobia . The sales clerk had stumbled as she was putting up the display and the book flew into the front of the window toppling all the other books in its path.
    Peyton walked in, bought the book, started reading it before she even left the store, and didn’t put it down until she had gulped it all down, sitting at the first Starbucks she encountered, swallowing every word whole, the very sustenance she had needed all these many years to finally bring comprehension to what she believed had become insanity. She did not return to work that day. After she finished the book, she walked to her car, drove to her favorite park, sat at a bench overlooking the vast and beautiful view—not the high-rise buildings of the city, but the endless stretch of Baldwin Hills, a vista of sagebrush, green and open skies. As the sun was beginning to set she cried.
    She cried for hours over finally being able to put a name to all her strange brain ruminations and her physical body attacks that made her feel an utter loss of control. Not to mention exhausted by the severity of her clamoring heart, her inability to breathe, her feeling utterly outside of her own skin. The physical aspects were daunting, but it was the surreal and bizarre thought process that had taken more out of her than anything. Her do-or-die need for ritual and the fanatical compulsion to follow random thought patterns as if they had any meaning or bearing of any kind on reality had completely devastated any confidence she had in the ability to be normal. Although, as